In all the media coverage about the visit of Prime Minister Cameron to President Obama, nobody seemed to think the 800 mile round trip on Airforce One to see a basketball game was anything worth mentioning. I am not a plane spotter so the following facts are the results of 5 mins of Googling: AirforceOne is basically a Boeing 747; which is a jumbo jet. It burns 5 gallons of fuel per mile – so the trip to the basketball game burned at least 4,000 gallons of fuel. Every gallon of jet fuel produce 21.1 lbs of CO2 – so a minimum of 85,000 lbs of CO2 was produced that evening.
I am not a sporting fan, so I don’t understand why two of the world’s leaders who should be showing leadership in a global economic and pollution crisis burn 4,000 gallons of aircraft fuel to see a ‘game’. That is both a lot of dollars and a lot of pollution. Is this a gender thing? It seems to me to be the equivalent of the Ab Fab ‘Door Handle’ episode when Patsy and Eddy take a day trip to New York by Concorde to go shopping. We laughed at them.
